THE MAN-POWER MAN.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 16035, 21 January 1918, Page 2

THE MAN-POWER MAN.

AN ANATOMIST OF FACTS.

. Sir Auckland Geddes (says the Daily Mail) is one of the new men the war has produced. Three years ago he was Professor of Anatomy at M‘6ill University, Montreal, Canada, with a reputation as a scientific investigator of problems in anthropology and biology. Behind this was. a history of student davs at Edinburgh—where lie played Rugby for his university and maintained the Geddes tradition for brains and courage—war service in South Africa and- then' again surgery and research. He is a man who will never be taken for -anyone but himself—cleanshaven, high-domed forehead, large, long square jaw, wide, firm mouth, deep-set. humorous kindly eyes; a tall man with a capacious handshake. He looked a unique and commanding- personality in khaki, and has lost no part of his “presence,’ by putting on a well-cut civilian suit again. As Director of Recruiting, General Geddes was bettor known to the inner circle of the Cabinet and War Council than to the public. Those who put him there to straighten out the mud-' die caused by our rapidly changing system of raising men for the army knew his capacity for clear thinking and calm reasoning, and his courage. Such qualities were needed. To-day as Minister of National Service and M.P. he is becoming known as* a man of large, broad ideas—one who talks facts and faces thjeni. There is more than a hint of the professor of anatomy in his speeches. As a professor of that exact science—he filled the chair of Anatomy at Dublin as well as at Montreal—he has been accustomed to talk and illustrate facts to two and three hundred critical young men at a. time; and a.sk them ,to draw deductions from those facts. Hence his ability to explain the process whereby the affairs of men and nations get into a tangle, and the obvious steps whiqh must be taken to unravel them. Ho has studied cause and effect in the most delicately balanced and wonderful machine in the wqrld; the human body. 'With the calm logic of the East, where his father lived and worked, he can say, “What is, has been; what has been, will be.” ' In his dealings with other men he can be courteous to all and firm withal. He has no illusions. To him the war appeals as a many-isided problem involving not merely the surface 'facts of life and death, victory and defeat, but also the vaster, broader issues of the birth of new empires, the_ death of old civilisations, the creation of new. Ho is not blind to the sordid side of human •nature or the subtler forms of danger which beset a nation at war. His appeal to his recruiting staff to beware of corruption was a word from, a man who has known what it is to he assailed by many tempta-tions--and has resisted_*hsHU , (